The Internet of Things (IoT) is a vision for interconnecting all of the world’s “things”—from vehicles to diet scales, smart homes and electrical grids—through a common set of networking technologies. Realizing this vision using a host-to-host communication paradigm, such as that of the Internet Protocol (IP), is challenging in the context of highly heterogeneous, constrained devices that connect intermittently to one or more networks, often using multiple interfaces; communicate within various security regimes; and require both local and global communication capability. Using IP and similar protocols as the narrow waist of interoperability for IoT requires managing data exchange and security in terms that are largely orthogonal to application semantics, while simultaneously needing to minimize resource usage. This paper explores how Named Data Networking (NDN), a proposed future Internet architecture, addresses the root causes of these challenges and can help achieve the IoT vision in a more secure, straightforward, and innovation-friendly manner. NDN’s data-centric communication model aligns network and application semantics, enabling developers to work with “things” and their data directly, and for IoT networks to be deployed and configured easily. To substantiate the high-level discussion, we give examples of ongoing design and implementation work in IoT over NDN and compare the architecture to well-known existing protocols and frameworks. Finally, we discuss short- and long-term scenarios for employing NDN to enable the Internet of Things.